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Old 08-12-2014, 08:15 AM
batarcit batarcit is offline Compiling/Indexing hundreds of recipes + adding a search by ingredient function. Windows 7 64bit Compiling/Indexing hundreds of recipes + adding a search by ingredient function. Office 2013
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Compiling/Indexing hundreds of recipes + adding a search by ingredient function.
 
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Default Compiling/Indexing hundreds of recipes + adding a search by ingredient function.

I am a currently a culinary assistant for a major wholesale food company that specializes in soup. I work under the head chef in the R&D department and I want to make their recipes and their ingredient logs more efficient. It’s my first job out of school, I’m in my second month, and I’m trying to prove I’m indispensable.

Anyways, there are several hundred recipes for many different companies and restaurants - each in their own excel file. There are even more ingredients but they are compiled into one excel file. As efficiently as possible I want to compile all the recipes into one document or workbook. I want to be able to search for an ingredient and see every recipe that it is in, and from there be able to click a recipe and have it open in a separate window. It would be so great to know what ingredients we barely use, as it costs beaucoup bucks to order them in the quantities that we do. What would be the best way to go about doing this with excel and/or Microsoft office suite 2013? Any help to set me off in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.



-bat
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Old 08-13-2014, 11:49 AM
DBlomgren DBlomgren is offline Compiling/Indexing hundreds of recipes + adding a search by ingredient function. Windows 8 Compiling/Indexing hundreds of recipes + adding a search by ingredient function. Office 2013
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Wow, Batarcit. That's a tall order.

With several hundred recipes and an unequal number of ingredients, it's hard to work with Excel and use it as a database. I think it's time you look into getting your company to use Access as a database. I've dabbled in it and recommend a course or an instruction book (whatever suits your learning style) to help you learn it.

Of course, then the situation is that you know Access and probably no one else at the company does. That means either job security or inconvenience.

Just thinking - The way you have it now, you can open the folder with all the recipes in MS File Explorer (you know, the little yellow file folder), search for "broccoli" and it will show all those recipes - which you would have to open one by one.

Another option: Put all the recipes on one worksheet. Add page breaks between each recipe. But then it turns into a logic problem: How do you tell Excel to search for broccoli everywhere, not just in one column? However, I'm thinking there must be companies that have a similar variety of data in Excel and they want to bring up certain data and hide others.

Could you attach a sample recipe in Excel or at least a screenshot to get an idea of what you're dealing with? A nice vegetarian soup with or without broccoli would be nice.

Last edited by DBlomgren; 08-13-2014 at 11:50 AM. Reason: Suggestion for soup.
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Old 08-13-2014, 03:09 PM
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macropod macropod is offline Compiling/Indexing hundreds of recipes + adding a search by ingredient function. Windows 7 32bit Compiling/Indexing hundreds of recipes + adding a search by ingredient function. Office 2010 32bit
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Unless each file is in the same format (e.g. a different row or column for every ingredient), you'll be unable to automate that. And, unless the ingredients and their quantities are differentiated into separate cells, a lot of processing overhead would be involved to do that for the destination workbook. Without such differentiation, you'd never be able to filter the destination workbook by ingredient.
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